Rachel looked at the men standing in the room as if about to face a firing squad. Then she reluctantly turned away, listening as Ryan ordered the men to go through the rest of the building. Outside, the moon was a pale disk over the Thames. She extinguished the lamp on her desk and gathered up her personal belongings. Ryan walked through the upstairs offices. Shutting each door as he checked the rooms. Sliding her arms into her jacket, she felt his movements in the next room.

Gravitating toward the security of Ryan's presence, she walked to the doorway of the adjoining office and stopped. No lamp lit the interior of the room. He was standing at the window, his hands clasped behind him, looking out across the river. The moonlight touched his close-cropped hair and lashes that were thick on a face quintessentially male-as distant as the stars-and she now recognized that his earlier restraint had been something barely contained and volatile.

"I hope I haven't delayed your departure for France."

"You scared the hell out of me tonight, Rachel," he said, his back still to her.

The words made her lungs catch on a breath. She'd been perfectly adept at bravery in the face of his calm. When she didn't respond, he turned to face her.

His gaze traveled from the top of her square-shaped hat, down her throat, over the most passe garment he'd probably ever seen on a woman. It was licorice color, with a mustard stripe on the cuff of her sleeves and hem of her skirt. She suddenly felt ugly.

But he said nothing and, when he raised his gaze, she decided that she must truly be in love with him. How else did one explain this hot, ungovernable urge to have him? To believe that he might want her, despite everything else she knew stood in their way, despite wisdom and logic, and the fact that she knew nothing about being a wife or mother to anyone's child.

Her presence would complicate his life. Ironically, his own company policy had helped to mark her. Rachel blinked as a pair of shiny black shoes appeared in her line of sight. Blinked again when the owner of those shoes tilted her chin, and she was suddenly looking into his face. "Are you all right?" he asked.

A door shut down the hall, and she nearly jumped out of her skin as a constable approached. His eyes greeted Ryan importantly. "Everything is secure on this floor, sir," he said, like a military sergeant in training. "Is there anything else you need?"

"Send my driver up after you make a sweep of the building outside."

After the men departed, Ryan returned his attention to her. The room was dark around them. Warmly intimate. She marshaled her thoughts, determined to dispel the panic overtaking her. No one else was on the floor.

"Did you wish to say anything more?" he quietly asked, his tone reminding her that she'd come to his office a few days ago to tell him something important.

She blinked away the moisture in her eyes and looked down at his arm. "You don't have a French opera singer on the side, do you?"

He traced a knuckle across her cheek, and she felt a familiar jolt. "No, Rachel."

"Ryan..." She scraped a length of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. "You and I need to talk. I don't think you are going to like what I-"

"Don't." His fingers went to her lips almost as if he recognized her intent.

She gently grasped his wrist with both palms. "When we were in Ireland...you asked me about the man I was with before."

"Do I need to know the truth?"

"Does Ore Industries' policy involve investigating hostile business rivals? Did Lord Devonshire initiate the process against me before you went to Ireland?"

"Why would he do that?"

"But you do investigate business rivals?"

With an oath, he shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned against the doorjamb, already on the defensive, sure that whatever she had to say he wouldn't like.

"I had a child, Ryan."

Rachel took a step away from him to distance herself from the look that came over his face. But the words were out, and she did not wish to pull them back. He had a right to know the kind of woman David had forced him to wed and who was now his wife. "The man I was involved with was a university administrator and professor where I audited my classes. I met him at my admissions interview. He signed my acceptance into the program and later recommended me to take the civil engineering exam."

"Before or after you fooked him, Rachel?"

She blanched. He turned his head and stared at her with flat furious eyes. "If that wasn't the way the scenario played out, then why are we standing here having this bloody conversation?"

Hot, stinging pressure built behind her eyes. "It wasn't like that?" Was it? she asked herself, had asked herself a thousand times in the years since. "We saw each other for two years. He liked books and art. I believed..." Shaking her head, she looked away, knowing it didn't matter what she'd believed about the relationship. "I was three months along when I'd learned he wed a London debutante.... I took the engineering exam behind my little curtained wall with my chaperone present. Then left Scotland. I met Elsie at the home David sent me to outside Dublin to have the baby. I eventually became a teacher for the other girls who were there."

Ryan still said nothing. Rachel rushed onward. "Lord Devonshire was on the university board of trustees." She toyed with the cording that edged her sleeve. "He must have found out about the affair. But I don't think he knows anything else. Will you at least say something?" she finally asked.

"What happened to the child?"

She pressed her lips together. "I came down with typhus in my eighth month. She lived for two weeks. She hadn't even been buried three months when Kathleen died. When I said those things to you that day -"

"Christ." Ryan bowed his head, rubbed his forehead with his thumbs, and quietly swore. "I'm sorry.""That's all there is to dredge up for your company's files and the reason why we can never be together."She drew in a breath, any further explanation skewed with the impossible realization that her scarlet past could do irreparable damage to his future. He would know this without her elaboration. "I don't want usto hurt each other. If we can keep our personal life separated from our business-""Technically, everything you own is mine, Rachel.""Technically, you're betrothed. There is no agreement between us." She stepped away, ready to leave the room, too exposed to separate the truth from his sarcasm.

Ryan put his arm across her path, trapping her against the doorframe. Her eyes were wet. The room wasas silent as a graveyard. "What am I supposed to say, Rache? Your timing couldn't be bloody worse.""Oh yes, you're leaving for Paris." She was incredulous. "You're pressed for time.""Pressed for time?" He, too, became incredulous. "Is that what you think I feel at this moment? Trust me, what I feel would probably get me hanged for murder. What would you have me say to something like

this, Mrs. Donally?"

The name slid off his lips and into her head like an incoming locomotive, shattering every trite reason she'

d built to keep him at bay. She wanted him-and no sanctimonious platitude she felt about his character or hers or anything else could suppress that realization and what it meant to her life. "I would ask if you believe what we have between us is still worth exploring," she said.

His eyes were on her face.

She could not read his thoughts. He glared at the ceiling, his tall shadow black on the silver-washed floor.

Moonlight spilled into the room from the window.

"Are you pregnant?"

"No," she whispered with less certainty than she should have felt. "Whatever you decide, it will not be

because you are forced to remain honorable."

"Honorable?" Self-mockery evident, he shook his head.

Then he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the door. "Whatever character traits I possess,

honor isn't one." His eyes lost their abstraction and focused on her. "I love you, Rachel," he said in a whisper. "I've never believed those words meant anything. But I want them to mean something to you."

"But..."

"You want this to be confession time?" he asked in an uneven voice. "You want to know about me? You were right when you accused me of killing Kathleen."

Watching him, she could only shake her head. "No, I wasn't-"

"I was an abysmal husband. She deserved more. She'd been so eager, so needy, so bloody desperate tofind meaning in her life that she could not find through me.""You don't need to tell me this."Ryan scraped his hands through his hair. "Don't I?" His eyes hardened on hers. "I thought I owed it to Kathleen's memory, never to fail our daughter. I swore that no one would ever shun Mary Elizabeth because she was the wrong religion or had the wrong color of hair. She would be welcome in any person 's home. These things were all important to me until I looked across a ballroom floor and saw you standing on a balcony drinking champagne with my brother. I don't know why you came back into my life. But nothing has been the same since."

Rachel wiped at her face with the heel of her hand. "Did you love Kathleen?"

"I loved her. I thought I could love her forever. But I couldn't give her what she needed. Do you knowwhat that manner of failure does to a man?""I know what the feeling of failure does to anyone," she whispered."I've never told another soul what I've just told you." He leaned his palm against the doorjamb behind her head."It is only fair that I know your secrets as well," she acknowledged."You scare the hell out of me, Rachel, because I don't want to hurt you either."She gazed into his face and couldn't remember another time in her life when she was so completely without thought. Emotions moved through her. Vivid feelings. Light.

"Rachel?" His dark eyes held hers in a simple declaration of tender passion that drained the tension from

her muscles. "I haven't slept. I drink a hell of a lot these days. I lie awake at night thinking of what it would be like to wake up to you every morning."

"I think about you, too."

They both shared a moment of solidarity in that regard, and Rachel, so naively new to every sensation

cascading through her, felt a rush of new desire spill over her senses. He felt it, too-the incautious urge,

the disquieting urgency to do more than touch hands.

"Smythe has already drawn up the papers to dissolve my betrothal contracts," he said against her hair.

"Everything is more complicated than I first thought."

"Are you concerned Lord Devonshire can hurt you?"

She felt his shrug and knew he wasn't telling her everything. "I've spent enough years in the churning

waters of corporate seas to know what happens when sharks smell blood." He touched a fingertip to her lips. "His fight is with me."

His driver entered the front room and stopped when he saw them. Ryan dropped his arms to his side and

stepped back. "I have to leave." Resting his hand on her waist, he brought her downstairs and gave instructions to the two night watchmen.

"I won't be out of the country long," Ryan said, when he delivered her to his carriage.

"Am I still invited to Paris?"

One hand braced on the door, he leaned inside the cab. "Have we settled everything between us then?"

he asked.

Was he finally asking her to choose between him and D&B?

His hand wrapped around her nape and he took her mouth in a full kiss. When he lifted his head, she was breathing fast. Whatever they had between them, neither of them could deny the passion that seemed to ebb and flow in their veins like a force of nature.

His eyes on hers, he shut the door and stepped away from the carriage.

"Mr. Smythe is downstairs, sir." Boswell stood in the doorway of Ryan's private chambers. "He said that you sent for him."

"I did." Ryan finished knotting his tie.

"I'll see that our bags are loaded in the carriage, sir. I've sent word to the station to have your car ready."

"Thank you, Boswell. Send Smythe up here."

He reached down and grabbed the stud to pin into the fine cloth of his tie. The last train for the coast would be leaving in an hour. He'd sent his daughter back to the country earlier, a better place to be in this summer heat.

After Boswell left, Ryan removed a velvet case from the drawer at his hip. He opened the lid and stared down at the betrothal ring he'd purchased for Gwyneth. Eight small pearls surrounded a single three-carat ruby that drew fire from the room. His gaze lifted to alight on the black velvet jewel case containing the only necklace he'd inherited from his mother. A match to the ring.

He could give Rachel anything. Almost anything. He hesitated with uncertainty. He'd never outright given her a gift. How did one court a wife who was neither swayed by his charm nor unduly awed by the trimmings and superfluities of his personal dominion? A woman who was a romantic at heart, even if she didn't want to admit that fact. Why was it so appallingly imperative that he impress her? Yet, it was.

He had thought of nothing but her, everything they had both said to one another, since putting her in his carriage.

A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. Smythe entered.

"I've brought Lord Devonshire's response, sir," he said, looking at Ryan standing in the lamplight and, perhaps for the first time in his life, completely uncertain. "His lordship considers your offer beneath him. Not only on the matter of the betrothal contracts but also on the matter of his business with you. He will take nothing less than Ore Industries."

The heat pressing down on him, Ryan looked out across the terraced yard.

Despite Ryan's bloodlust to commit a violent crime against his lordship, he knew that he had only himself to blame for his current situation. He had laid down the criterion that forged the alliance from which Devonshire could not wriggle, without considering the noose he'd put around his own neck. He'd already apprised Lord Ravenspur of the situation in case Devonshire would pay a call to Rachel. Gwyneth was in Brighton, and had probably heard that he'd been to see her uncle last week. At twenty, she now seemed very young to him-and he disliked the mercenary part he'd played in making her a pawn against her uncle.

"I'll only be absent as long as it takes to seal this Paris matter." Any other business he had planned while in France, he would cancel. "I'll manage the details of the settlement to Gwyneth myself and put everything in a trust." But there was a more important matter to which Ryan needed to attend. "I want to know who authorized an investigation on Miss Bailey's activities and everyone involved. I want them discharged. Devonshire is no longer to have access to company archives. Is that clear?"